Please Don’t Touch the Body

“A magnificent debut” (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of being a woman. "In these carefully crafted stories, lonely people come face to face with the strange or the unsettling, leading to messy, horny, funny, and ultimately profound complications." —Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel and The Other Americans The 11 stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body are at once dry and comic, grounded and surreal as they play deftly with genre and expectation to explore human alienation. In the collection’s first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades, while in the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped, and controlled by his young, queer owner. And in “Thank You No Thank You” a young woman who grew up in a cloistered religious community and escaped to a liberal law school grapples with the rules she learned in childhood, the rules of her new life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend. Together these inventive, emotionally rich stories reveal an incredible new vision and voice and a writer to watch.